Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

“Love talk” names that style of talk that is only too familiar to scholars of the early modern period: Heavily sonorous, rich in modifiers, and overflowing with figures of physical dissolution, love talk is a style marked above all by cliché. The last of these figures have posed a burden to critics of Romeo and Juliet, who have sought to recover Shakespeare’s tragedy from the deadening grip of the cliché. In so doing, they have suppressed the play’s self-conscious embrace of the cliché. This chapter argues that Romeo and Juliet is a script for following scripts of love. The tragedy shows how love enlists the most publicly circulated linguistic forms so that it might be experienced as a private, self-generated, and formless event. The seduction of this script is thus its central contradiction: Love is an experience that extricates the lover from the social by immersing the lover so completely within its forms that they may be forgotten. Love-talk is central to this dialectic. The style’s insistent, even unbearable artifice recalls earlier love stories for the present one to follow. It also turns Romeo and Juliet itself into another such story for audiences to follow in turn.

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.

This chapter demonstrates the pervasive presence of the rhetorical figure of apophasis in Austen’s writing. Guides to rhetoric, in the eighteenth century and earlier, describe apophasis as occurring when a person claims not to speak of something and in saying so, speaks of it. Austen evidently enjoyed the irony of the figure, as her juvenilia especially demonstrates. But she also appreciated its efficiency and tact, touching, but not elaborating, upon subject matter. This chapter argues that Austen saw common statements of inexpressibility as apophatic, as they draw attention to supposedly suppressed material. Many characters in Austen’s fiction claim not to be able to express themselves. Austen transforms an often cliched form of expression into a subtle narrative movement towards what characters do not utter. In this way, apophasis contributes to the development of free indirect discourse, sharing with this technique the dynamic of speaking and not speaking at the same time.